Wired Magazine interviews author Robert Neuwirth on black market entrepreneurs. The underground economy, Neuwirth says, is the second-largest economy on Earth (after the U.S.) and is a major source of innovation.
Business Insider has an interview with Ben Milne (left), founder of Dwolla, an innovative online payment system that sidesteps credit card fees and solves security and efficiency problems in the current online banking system. Dwolla, with about a dozen employees, is on track to handle $350 million in payments per month and is being adopted by banks and business across the country.
Read about the Iowa-based startup here.
Related: hard truths about what startup life is really like.
Is Microsoft doomed to fail? Does the LinkedInIPO signal a new bubble? Is Google the model of success? Silicon Valley entrepreneur, writer, and professor, Steve Blanks, makes a number of bold assertions about the state of tech-based businesses in this Business Insider article.
For more information about Steve Blanks, visit his website.
Jack Stack is the founder and Chief Executive Officer of SRC Holdings Corporation, an award-winning, employee-owned organization based in Springfield, Missouri. Springfield Remanufacturing Corporation and its 22 subsidiaries provide a wide range of products and services, including engine remanufacturing, packing and distribution, business consulting and banking. SRC employs 1,600 people and generates annual revenues of about $400 million.
Kaizen: Where did you grow up?
Stack: I was born in Chicago in 1948. My father bought a house in Elmhurst, Illinois, and I lived in Elmhurst from the time that I was about three years old to about 30. Then I was transferred to Springfield, Missouri, where I’ve spent the last 31 years of my life.
Kaizen: It sounds like you were a wild card as a youth—you were kicked out of college and seminary and fired from a job at General Motors?
Check out Entrepreneur Magazine‘s fascinating profile of Angelo Sotira, co-founder and CEO of DeviantART, a popular social network (over 14 million members) for visual artists of all kinds. Sotira and his colleagues created an innovative architecture to support online creative communities years before Facebook and MySpace, with features that those more famous social networks later appropriated. The article covers Sotira’s career, DeviantART’s history, its plans for the future, and also features a short video about Sotira and DeviantART.
Norm Augustine believes that America is falling behind other countries like China and India in technological innovation. This is because our culture portrays engineers and scientists as nerds rather than venerating them, because our educational system deemphasizes science and math, and because we don’t invest enough in long-term basic research. “Despite what many Americans believe,” he writes, “our nation does not possess an innate knack for greatness. Greatness must be worked for and won by each new generation.”
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Read our Kaizen interview with Judy Estrin, in which she covers similar themes.
Ken Phillips, in an article for Independent Contractors Australia, analyzes the failure of Australian government programs to nurture more entrepreneurship and innovation. The problem, he says, is that society is structured in a way that discourages self-employment. This decreases the amount of innovation in society because the experience of self-employment engenders a psychology of innovation. The self-employed person must constantly come up with new, creative ways to please clients. Phillips contrast self-employment to standard employment, which fosters a psychology of obedience to superiors and thus a lack of creative thinking.
It’s easy to understand the importance of innovators and entrepreneurs to the economy, but it’s much harder to figure out the best ways to encourage more entrepreneurship. In an article for TechCrunch, Vivek Wadhwa explores Start-Up Chile, a program that he calls “Chile’s Grand Innovation Experiment.” Most initiatives to create the next Silicon Valley have failed, Wadhwa argues, because they use a top-down approach that fatally leaves out the most important ingredient — the entrepreneurs themselves. Start-up Chile is therefore unique because, rather than building office parks and partnering with VC’s and universities, it focuses on attracting innovators and entrepreneurs from all over the world to Chile, where they will start their own businesses.
Popular Science has a great, in-depth feature on the best innovations of 2010. The feature lists 100 innovations from various categories, including auto tech, computing, gadgets, green tech, and home entertainment, as well as the grand awards for the most innovative from each category. There are also interesting profiles of several innovators.
Check out the feature on Popular Science.
Kauffman Labs for Enterprise Creation recently launched its first Women in Science and Engineering Business Idea Competition. “We know that more women than ever are leading U.S. businesses and hold a nearly three-to-one majority in undergraduate and graduate education, but too few pursue the path of high-growth entrepreneurship,” said Lesa Mitchell, vice president, Kauffman Foundation. “The Women in Science and Engineering Business Idea Competition is designed to illuminate world-changing concepts that have significant commercialization potential, and to escalate their visibility so that more female scientists and engineers are encouraged to pursue their entrepreneurial ideas.”
Learn more about the competition at the Kauffman Foundation’s website.
Also, be sure to read our fascinating Kaizen interviews with two highly-educated female entrepreneurs, Reena Kapoor and Judy Estrin. Both women share their thoughts on the effect of culture on innovation and entrepreneurship.
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